Tony Whitehead

  • London's concrete quarter
    Building Study

    London's concrete quarter

    2014-02-21T00:00:00

    The transformation of King’s Cross includes some of the UK’s most sustainable office buildings - and concrete is key to all of them

  • St Paul's School, London by Nicholas Hare
    Technical

    St Paul's School, London by Nicholas Hare

    2013-10-23T06:15:00

    Architectural standards were slipping at the 500-year-old St Paul’s School in London, but the elegant exposed interiors and concrete colonnades of Nicholas Hare’s new science building augur well for the future

  • Foster & Partners' Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan
    Technical

    Queen Alia Airport, Jordan by Foster + Partners

    2013-08-06T12:30:00

    Foster + Partners’ new airport in Jordan uses a mix of in-situ and precast concrete techniques to create a mesmerising, repeating pattern of shallow domes, curving beams and gently tapering columns

  • Kisho Kurokawa's Maggie Centre
    Building Study

    Kisho Kurokawa's Maggie's Centre

    2012-06-13T00:01:00

    Before he died in 2007, the legendary Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa sketched out a swirling, ‘dragon-tailed’ cancer care centre in Swansea. Now the UK’s 13th Maggie’s Centre has been completed in titanium-studded concrete by Garbers & James

  • The exterior is set inset with hundreds of triangular titanium plates
    Building Study

    Solving the panel puzzle

    2012-06-12T00:01:00

    The Maggie’s Centre certainly provided a stern test of the capabilities of precast concrete supplier Thorp Precast. The job involved creating 56 precast panels, and although many of these were similar, very few were identical

  • Other architects have made extensive use of concrete in their Maggie's designs, including Roger Stirk Harbour + Partners, Rem Koolhaas and Snohetta
    Building Study

    The ‘cosmic whirlpool’ and other Maggie’s Centres

    2012-06-11T00:00:00

    When writer and garden designer Maggie Keswick Jencks was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993, together with her husband, the architectural writer Charles Jencks, she set about her creating a charity project to provide cancer sufferers with expert support within a more sympathetic built environment